Horses and shit

Three things united only by an equine theme.

1. White Horse bigger than Nelson's Column planned for Kent. That it appears to be act of almost unspeakable ghastliness scarcely needs to be said: the aesthetic of the porcelain figurines favoured by menopausal, sentimental women plonked into Kent on a gargantuan scale in the vain hope of impressing foreigners arriving on the Eurostar. What's wrong with a bigger Nelson's Column to welcome them anyway?

One can live with the prospect that the French will have an excuse for another 100 years of so of sneering at the vulgarity and poor taste of Les Rosbifs. One can accept that it's a damnable waste of money; even that the people building it struggle with the proper distinction between small and far away (thereby completely undoing the Renaissance development of perspective).

What's really so bad is the justification for it: it will impress people. Art doesn't work like that, the imagination and the sense of beauty doesn't: people are impressed by that which grabs them, not by that which sets out to bludgeon them into submission.

2. Government drug adviser "sparks tabloid fury" by pointing out that more people die from riding horses than from taking ecstasy. Does anyone dispute his figures? They have not. Do some people get upset by suggesting drugs might not kill them? They do. Should we care about that? Well, no.

That the government is packed with pusillanimous panderers to puritanism is not news. When said drug adviser suggests that, since ecstasy is less lethal than horse riding, it might be a waste of time to impose punitive sanctions on ecstasy use it's a waste of time, and gets ignored for fear of what the Daily Mail might say, again it's not news. (Nor is the boundless contempt one feels at this form of governance).

What is worth noting is that no one has asked the important question. Is horse riding more fun than taking ecstasy? It's pointless trying to weigh up whether either activity is worth the risk without this sort of information.

3. Now for the good good news: Tony McCoy's 3,000th winner. In a world with justice this achievement, with all it entails, would get the recognition it deserves. Ah well.

Bloody Labour

Even by Gordon Brown's admittedly high standards, his attempts to appear like an everyday person make him appear astonishingly strange, creepy and maladroit.

His latest such effort, talking about his supposed fondness for the robot superhero Optimus Prime (a Transformer – "Robots in Disguise" as I recall – has the usual effect). It's not such an unlikely role model for Brown though.

Behold his alter-ego: Optimus Subprime, a clunking robotic figure who transforms the British economy, motor vehicles and all, into a heap of smouldering junk.

Bloody Tories

Is anyone, bar Madeline McCann's immediate family that concerned that a bunch of young Tories make poor taste jokes and are idiotic enough to put the evidence online? Is it going to change anyone's vote at the next election? Does anyone really think Caroline "Nannygate" Spelman is the best person to decide what is and is not embarrassing to the Tory Party? Spare us the crocodile tears.

Admittedly the Young Conservatives themselves are a perpetual embarrassment - Conservative Future as I should call them after the Thatcher Youth were disbanded for being a bit too embarrassing and right-wing - but the really disturbing thing is that youthful pratishness should be seen as some sort of great political scandal.

The implication being that student politicians should always be on the alert to see how their antics affect their party in the wider world. The problem with this is that some of the most ghastly people one could possibly encounter at an institute of higher education are student politicians. The obnoxious, tribal, yobbish types - like young Lewis - are bad enough; but the very worst are the goody-goody careerists, hacks and toadies.

I can think of a few university contemporaries of mine who have risen through the ranks in their respective parties. Generally the less impressive they are, the better they do. The reaction to the Madeline McCann stunt will only encourage their like in student unions throughout the country.

Acting like a twat at university should not be a bar to high office in later life. But the mere fact of having been a student politician should.

Afterthough: It occurs to me now that the Tory boy's most grievous offence was the sheer lack of effort that went into his "bad taste" outfit. The oh-so predictable race to be "shocking" and "offensive" is rather stale. In my day, and I am aware this is making sound like even more of a choleric old git, the whole point of bad taste parties was to be imaginative or witty in a bid to see how badly dressed one could be.

All morality is quite useless

An addendum to the previous. There is one especially corrosive and long-established form of idiocy: the desire to impose one's moral views on everyone. Lamentably it has always been popular. Of course, the people who do this sort of thing usually fail to distinguish between morals and ethics, and they are usually wrong about whatever it is that they wish to moralise about, but these are mere details beside the fact that such sanctimoniousness is unutterably annoying.

Take, if you like, this week's news that some people in Worthing are seeking to remove a plaque commemorating Oscar Wilde.

Chris Hare... points out that Wilde, a homosexual man married with children, had a documented taste for seducing teenage boys. At least one of his victims, a 14-year-old newspaper delivery boy named Alphonso, had to flee Worthing when the scandal of his relationship with Wilde became public knowledge. "This role model, a man preying on teenage boys with little or no education - I don't think that would be regarded as heroic today."

This is the perfect type of a perfect preposterousness. It is exquisite and leaves one wanting more. And, of course, it encapsulates the trouble with moralisers in one anecdote. One would not regard that sort of thing as heroic today, of course, but Wilde lived in a different age when sexual mores were rather different to our own. The age of consent for girls was 13, there was no age of consent at all for homosexual sex and lesbianism was not illegal because, the story goes, Queen Victoria refused to believe such a thing existed.

Besides: Wilde is not honoured for being a fat old queen. Sex with teenagers was not what bothered the Victorians at all: it was the homosexuality. That no one would really expect to be taken seriously if, today, they objected to honouring Wilde on the grounds he was posing as a somdomite highlights the folly of trying to impose contemporary moral values on the past. Were Hare's argument to be taken to its extreme, we should revile Plato and a host of other Greeks for their advocacy of pederasty. (Admittedly there has been the odd prep school classics teacher who has taken Grecian mores rather too much to heart, but that hardly detracts from the main point).

News of Wilde's sexual inclinations

came as a great shock to the Victorians

More lamentably, the inability to distinguish between the artistic work and the person who produced it shows a woefully distorted set of perspectives. It is wrong-headed, it is philistine and shows an inability to distinguish the valuable from mere dross. One could see this, to an extent, in some of the responses to Harold Pinter's death. It is not that people criticised his political views (which were admittedly asinine) nor that they were a factor in considering the man as a whole. For that matter there was nothing wrong with criticising those political views immediately after his death: it's the inability to judge his plays as plays that disturbs.

Admittedly, Pinter's is a fairly trivial example. But the attitude is, I think, a dangerous one too. The fact that Wilde's work was ignored for decades because of the desire to allow moral considerations to trump everything else should cause the modern day moralists to pause before we head down the path of ignoring work by people of whom we do not approve. Totalitarians, both political and religious, have always been rather keen on this after all, and taste and decency are but staging posts along the road of silence, censorship and suppression.

Let's let Oscar sum up:

I never came across in anyone in whom the moral sense was dominant who was not heartless, cruel, vindictive log-stupid, and entirely lacking in the smallest sense of humanity. Moral people, as they are termed, are simple beasts. I would sooner have fifty unnatural vices than one unnatural virtue. It is unnatural virtue that makes the world, for those who suffer, such a premature Hell.

PS: Is this effort by a contemporary pederast so terribly wrong because of the values espoused, or is it the fact that such a terrible-looking old roué singing a bloody awful song presents such an unpleasant spectacle? I shall have to listen to some music by that vile anti-Semite Wagner to recover.

Trollied Tuesday: Family Friendly Pubs.

Are generally a bad idea.

An increasing trend towards more “family friendly” pubs has not created the atmosphere of similar establishments on the Contintent. The “baby lager louts” who run wild and are left unchecked by parents have triggered a record number of complaints to compilers of The Good Pub Guide 2009.

Rising numbers of protests about children in bars have been registered from pubgoers who say that relaxing over a pint or a meal out is increasingly likely to be ruined by children’s unruly behaviour.

Quite. People who don't have kids themselves don't want to be around kids. Many parents will admit to finding other people's kids not quite so appealing as their own kids. Some parents, I believe, occasionally like a break from tantrum-throwing toddlers.

It's a similar argument to that used in favour of the smoking ban, that people who previously hadn't gone into pubs will now go into pubs. It ignores the fact that by doing so many more people who had been frequenting the pubs will go somewhere else.

Is it really so hard to train kids to stand outside with a packet of crisps and a can of vimto for a couple of hours?

History in the making, poor old history

It's as good a time as any to revisit my predictions on Sarah Palin; not so much a pitbull with lipstick, then, more one of those annoying little yappy dogs that keeps snapping at your ankles but which you cannot boot into touch for fear some misguided fool will think badly of you for so doing - with lipstick. Looking back she's not quite an Eagleton-esqe liability, but nor is she a Nixon-esqe master of turning attack into defence (this is 1952 I'm talking about, remember).

However, I did highlight the potential for Troopergate to embarrass her: though the report on the affair is a classic example of the political compromise that satisfies no one. It found, in essence, that she abused her powers but was legally entitled to do so. (Thanks for that chaps). I also failed to spot the full capacity of a religious extremist for pandering to the more ignorant and hate-filled elements of society. Anyway, let's put her somewhere between Dan Quayle and Spiro Agnew in the scale of foolish picks and be done with the matter. Certainly I think my prediction holds up better than Dominic's comment on my original post "Well, here's to her becoming next VP. She should prove well up to the task."

Anyway, it would seem that McCain is regretting his choice (or the fact that he agreed to her being foisted upon him), as this report from the Sunday Times suggests. (NB: British reports on US politics always carry a health warning, however, it sometimes suits American politicians to leak things they are unwilling to release to the British media to the Brits in the full knowledge it will be picked up back home).

McCain has become alarmed about the fury unleashed by Sarah Palin, the moose-hunting “pitbull in lipstick”, against Senator Barack Obama. Cries of “terrorist” and “kill him” have accompanied the tirades by the governor of Alaska against the Democratic nominee at Republican rallies.

I suspect that both think the election is lost and Palin is planning her run for the White House next time round (with the support of the most detestable elements of her own party). But while Palin with one hand waves the Bible, with the other releasing the rats from the sewer; McCain on the other hand appears to have chosen the path of decency and honour by taking on the more deranged and hateful elements of his own party – getting booed for telling them that no, actually, Obama isn't a Muslim terrorist and would you please shut up about it as it makes the rest of us look bad. I won't help him at the polls, but if he can take on the worse elements of his own party, he might ensure that he goes down in history as one of the great honourable losers (like Wendell Wilkie in 1940, perhaps) rather than a gambler who staked his reputation and lost.

Reasons why Gordon Brown is not as good as Tony Blair

The first in what may, or may become an occasional feature depending on whether I can be bothered and on boring stuff like running the country properly.

1. His contempt for sartorial matters.

2. The makers of the Simpsons don't want him.

3. Surely you've seen this by now? Another person who doesn't want him. (This too)

I've I didn't know better, I'd say they were breeding

I spent much of the afternoon wandering through various bits of the London borough of Camden. I didn't meet any picturesque nutters or have long chats with eccentrics, which is just fine by me. However I did notice one disturbing trend.

Now anyone who's spent more than five minutes in central London of an afternoon will have noticed the hordes of brightly dressed types handing out, well more forcibly impressing onto you, various free evening 'newspapers'. But now they're spreading outwards. I saw loads of The London Paper (I'm not playing their pointless lower case games, do they real imagine that hip, young types are scared by a few capital letters on the masthead?) hawkers trying to give copies away to the various Japanese students, teenage Italian goths and terminal alcoholics you find washing round Camden town. That's pretty desperate, thought I. I carried on my wanderings.

Later I saw them again (presumably another crowd of paper pushers) targeting people outside Swiss Cottage, Finchley Road and West Hampstead stations. When you consider almost everyone they met there at six in the evening will likely have passed through central London - and therefore had to literally push past a vast array of free paper people, and had ample chances to pick up discarded copies on the tube - you must concede they're really desperate if they are hoping that people who have, unaccountably, passed up their earlier opportunity to pick up a free paper will miraculously change their minds and think 'Why, yes. I think a fix of The London Paper will, after all, make my journey home more pleasant'.

It's the Mrs Doyle school of marketing. G'wan, g'wan, g'wan, g'wan, g'wan, g'wan, g'wan... repeated until your will is crushed and you take one anyway. It strongly suggests (more than easily rigged figures) the rag isn't getting enough people to pick it up, read it and therefore convince advertisers they've got a great space to sell stuff to people.

Now I'm not an expert but... no, hang on, I actually know something about this. For all the money and effort spent in an attempt to force every single person in greater London to take a copy of the thing, there's precious little money spent on actual, you know, journalism that people might want to read.

Even the most vacuous and brain-dead Londoner will quickly tire of the pathetic, bite-sized, anodyne news and features content. Their eyes will glaze over, making them utterly unreceptive to the 'buy this, it's really great' bits which, presumably, the paper needs to survive. And so the management will start ever more desperate attempts to hand out the paper in the hope that sheer weight of people clutching the thing will someone cancel out this problem in the eyes of the advertisers.

Remember, London will never be free until the last pigeon is strangled with the last copy of The London Paper.